Issue date: 10/27/05 Section: Editorial/Opinion

Media Credit: file photo

For a little while there, Judy Miller got her moment in the sun.

There she was, the heroic journalist going to jail in order to protect her sources. She was hailed by friends and foes alike for her commitment to journalistic integrity, and was applauded by her employer, the New York Times, not to mention journalism institutions everywhere.

Her sources were mouthpieces of war supporters, and she either failed to see that or knew it and passed it along anyway.

But alas, recent revelations about the case have brought an already untrusting public to further doubt the media, and the Times, fresh off one scandal, and in the middle of another issue arguably worse than the first.

Miller spent 85 days in jail this summer for refusing to identify a source in the Valerie Plame case before a grand jury and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Many expect indictments of very high-ranking Bush administration officials this week on a case that started in February 2002, when former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a harsh op-ed in the New York Times.

Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate claims of uranium yellowcake, a dangerous substance used in nuclear reactors. When he found none, he reported back his findings, or lack thereof.

He later wrote an editorial in the Times criticizing Bush for saying, in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq was seeking yellowcake from Niger when in fact the country possessed none, and Wilson had made this clear to the administration.

Seemingly trying to get back at Wilson, the administration leaked to the media the name of his wife, covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, or Valerie Wilson, shortly after the editorial ran.

This put Plame in serious danger. In World War II, a person who leaked her name would be ostracized for treason, if not taken out back and shot.

So, where does Miller come in? She wrote no articles containing Valerie Plame's name but has been an integral part of the process nonetheless.

At first, nobody knew the answer to that question and questioned why she was sent to jail. This led to the initial blind praise for Miller.

But as the story started to unfold, and the public gained more knowledge of the grand jury's secret deliberations, Miller started to look less and less like the journalistic martyr she was made out to be.

Among other things, she was told Plame's name by a member of the Bush administration, and it has also shown Miller's pre-Iraq War reporting was, to put it nicely, suspect.

Months before the weapons of mass destruction falsehoods were officially debunked by officials, Miller took their words and wrote them as truths, passing on claims of weapons of mass destruction.

She also said Iraq secretly sent weapons and technology to Syria in the mid-1990s, and she reported Iraq had been cooperating with al-Qaeda, when it was later revealed they actually hated each other.

Her sources were mouthpieces of war supporters, and she either failed to see that or knew it and passed it along anyway. Either way, none of it should have ever reached a newspaper such as the New York Times.

One of the reasons why it did, incidentally, is because of another scandal the Times was still reeling from at the time of the run-up to the Iraq War.

Jayson Blair's faked quotes, plagiarized interviews and other acts of journalistic fraud rocked the newspaper in May 2003 and led to the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyle.

The current managing editor, Bill Keller, said last week he had many regrets over Miller's reporting and his lack of questioning the weapons of mass destruction reports. At the time, he didn't feel it was his place to attack previous editors and he put the issue off for almost a year, allowing "anger inside and outside the paper to fester."

Bottom line? It's tough to trust the New York Times nowadays. This is the second major scandal in a relatively short amount of time and, as a reader, I am forced to question who their sources are, whether or not they are credible, and simply if I believe their reporting is objective or not.

I don't have any solutions for what the Times can do to win my, and many others', trust back except for long periods of solid reporting. Until then, I think I'll turn to the BBC and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Further, why the Society of Professional Journalists chose to continue to go ahead and give her an award also is baffling.

Miller received a First Amendment award and was a keynote speaker at the SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference Oct. 18 in Las Vegas.

This came amid a steady stream of reports that Miller, in fact, was light years away from the figure she was made out to be and probably did far more harm than good to the institution of journalism.

The SPJ never should have honored Miller or even invited her to the conference, because it doesn't say much to a public that is already untrusting of journalists.

And one untrustworthy journalist getting an award from other professional journalists does nothing to sway that opinion.

Now that the truth has begun to come out, and surely the full story will be revealed in the coming weeks, the Miller story went from that of a journalism hero to another sad chapter in the history of the New York Times.

Schaaf is a junior print journalism major and staff writer of The Spectator.

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